Abstract

The support of context-level interoperability demands increasing attention in today’s arena of semantics-oriented decision-support systems. Unlike data-oriented exchange, such semantic interoperability must venture beyond the elementary communication of discrete data values and endeavor to translate between significantly more expressive, context-rich representations. Further, support of this level of interoperability must not require a contamination of the native perspective embedded within each participant’s representation. Offered as a foundation upon which specific interoperability solutions can be developed, this paper presents a service-oriented framework supporting an extensible set of translation paradigms to effectively connect expressive ontology-based environments. Fundamental to this capability is the notion of a remote service request. Employing such a metaphor as the basis for participant interaction allows each system within a universe of potentially diverse representations to interoperate as collections of invocable services. By transparently marshalling such requests between client and service representations, each member of this multilingual reality is empowered to interoperate within the familiar confines of its native representation. This paper concludes by evaluating this framework in terms of the Levels of Conceptual Interoperability Model ( LCIM).